If you're played the "Phoenix Wright" Nintendo DS games you may have noticed that they're a little different.
Part throw-back to text-adventure games, part shining beacon of how funny games can still intentionally be.
Part rare video game coutroom drama, part case study in just how non-interactive a game can be.
Last week I e-mailed Capcom a bunch of questions about the series:
How do these games get made? How do they get so funny? Would they designers ever make a law game in which you only defend guilty people? What have lawyers said to you about these games? And so on...
I wrote up some of the answers in my MTV News GameFile column yesterday, but I found the interview so interesting that I'm posting the whole thing here. Some of the answers were quite brainy, much to my delight.
Two things jumped out at me in the interview. The first is series producer Minae Matsukawa's description of the relationship between the player and Phoenix Wright, the character they control.
We also wanted to betray the player’s feelings. The player may want Phoenix to do one thing, but he’ll do another, even after the player knows what’s really going on. Playing through an Ace Attorney game, you can see that Phoenix is one part the player, and one part his own character, Phoenix Wright. And when the player walks around, they solve the case both with and as Phoenix at the same time. In a way, this case set out to betray not only the player, but also the character Phoenix himself.
The other ties into a comment made by gamer Calvin Smith on a "Zelda" post I published yesterday. He lamented that "a lot of developers and gamers claim open-endedness as a virtue." When I asked Matsukawa about the common critique that the gameplay in "Phoenix Wright" is too linear, she said:
If we were to give players any more leeway ... the structure of the game would fundamentally change. We wouldn’t be able to tell a single story anymore if there were too many paths. Also, what we want the players to enjoy is not so much the solving of each riddle they come across them one at a time, but rather, the ability to use their logic to put together what happened as they collect the pieces of the larger puzzle, as it were, and that’s something that we feel is an important aspect of the game.
Food for thought. The full interview is below.
